It is common today to provide for the automated acceptance of currency in transactions. For example, transit busses in the United States and Canada are normally equipped with fareboxes to collect fares from riders and securely store the coins, tokens, and bills used to pay these fares.
In order to provide secure storage and/or to allow for the transportation of the collected fares between the busses, where they are initially received, to a money room where they are sorted, accounted, and prepared for deposit, the fareboxes typically include some form of cashbox. However, typical prior art cashboxes often are not designed for the most efficient storage and handling of collected currency.
Typically prior art cashboxes include a simple cavity in which to receive and store currency. Accordingly, as currency notes are accepted, they are deposited in the cavity loosely to collect randomly at the bottom of the cavity. As such, the collected bills may curl, fold, and rest in different orientations to require a much larger area for storage than if the notes were neatly stacked in a same orientation.
These cashboxes may include separation of currency notes and currency coins. However, such cashboxes are often provided only with a single opening, typically at the top of the cashbox, through which to both receive currency and dispense currency. Accordingly, once removed from the bus farebox, the cashbox is typically inverted to remove the currency stored therein. As both the note and coin storage areas include a common opening, inversion of the cashbox may result in the extracted coins and notes becoming intermingled. This requires sorting by hand in order to separate the coins and notes.
In the prior art the notes are stored loose in the cashbox. As such, the notes are neither stacked or faced, i.e., having the front of each bill facing the same direction, as required by automated note sorting and counting apparatus. Accordingly, hand sorting must generally be relied upon to stack and face the notes.
The ratio of collected coins to notes may vary depending on circumstances such as a particular route a bus travels or a change in fares where the standard fare is changed from a fraction of a dollar to a whole dollar amount. However, typical prior art cashboxes do not provide adjustability of the coin and note storage areas. Instead, these storage areas are simply designed to be large enough to accommodate the largest amount of coins likely as well as the largest amount of notes likely. However, this brute force design technique, although simple to implement, does not provide an efficient use of a limited amount of space.
A further disadvantage of the typical prior art cashbox is in accounting for receipts of individual busses. For example, because of the aforementioned problems in sorting the monies collected in prior art cashboxes, the receipts of multiple cashboxes are generally intermingled requiring hand sorting. However, this does not provide any means by which the receipts of a particular cashbox may be accounted for.
Accordingly, a need exists in the art for a cashbox which securely stores collected coins and notes discretely.
A further need exists in the art for the cashbox to conveniently present the stored coins and notes separately for accounting purposes.
A still further need exists in the art for the storage of notes by the cashbox to be in a tight stack having a common orientation and common facing.